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Sunday, 15 June 2014

Today is, as you will have gathered,
Trinity Sunday. It's a sort of last hurrah between the end of the
special seasons, which came to their climax last week at Pentecost,
and the endless weeks of Ordinary Time that will run between now and
Advent, way off at the end of November.

So we had Advent last year, then
Christmas, then Epiphany, and then a few weeks of Ordinary Time as
Easter was due to be late, then Lent, then Easter, and recently
Ascension and then last weekend Pentecost. And now Trinity Sunday.
All the other special seasons are either about, or preparing for,
significant events in Jesus' life, but Trinity is a bit different.

The concept of the Trinity isn't really
found in the Bible – the bit about doing things in the name of the
Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit is as near as it gets. It's
really the early church's efforts to put things into words that don't
really go. They knew, as we know, that the Father is not the Son or
the Spirit, the Son is not the Father or the Spirit, and the Spirit
is not the Father or the Son. But the Father is God, the Son is God
and the Holy Spirit is God. And yet we don't have three Gods, we
only have one God.

That's basically what it's about, but
it's very confusing. And the trouble is, most illustrations simply
don't give you more than a tiny glimpse of it, if that. You can, for
instance, say think of three tins of soup – maybe you have lentil
soup, mushroom soup and chicken soup, which are all different but all
soup. But that doesn't really help, as soup is soup, and whatever
flavour you drink. Some people like to think of an egg – the yolk,
the white and the shell. Or an apple – the core, the flesh and the
skin.

My own preferred illustration is of
water, ice and steam – all H2O but very different from
each other and used for different purposes. Water is not ice, and
water is not steam; ice is not water, and ice is not steam; steam is
not water and steam is not ice. But water is H2O, ice is
H2O and steam is H2O. Water is about drinking
and washing; ice is about skating and cooling injuries. Oh, and
cooling drinks, too, of course. And steam is about clearing your
head when you have a cold, and showing you that the kettle is
boiling.... So it is quite a good illustration.

But even that is merely a tiny glimpse
of what the Trinity is all about. Maybe we shouldn't even try to
explain the Trinity – it's what's called a mystery, meaning that
while we can get a good working image of what it's all about, we know
that it isn't more than an image and our conception may well change
over time. We'll never know exactly what it's all about, because we
are not God!

But, as St Paul points out, we can
think of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the
fellowship of the Holy Spirit! That makes it easier, I think. We
might not understand how we can have three Persons, as the technical
term has it, in one God, but we can understand a little about the
Grace. We will close this service, as we close so many services, by
wishing one another God's grace in these very words.

I wonder, then, what we are actually
wishing each other. Again, when you start to unpack it, it isn't as
easy as it looks. After all, what, exactly, does “Grace” mean?
We think we know – we have a working model of it – but again,
it's one of those concepts that really doesn't go into words, as so
many of the things of God don't. Oh, we say glibly that it's “God's
riches at Christ's expense”, and of course that is very much part
of it, but it's only part of it. Grace is about all that Christ
gives to us in the package we call “salvation”. We can't earn
grace, we can only accept it as a freebie. It is everything that
Christ poured out for us on the Cross. And it is that that we pray
for one another!

And then Love. Again, how can we put
this into words? We know what love means – we think. But then, we
love strawberries and we love our children and we love our spouses or
partners, and it's not the same sort of love, is it?

If you want a general definition of
love, one can say it is the condition whereby the happiness and
safety of the beloved is of greater concern than your own. The
happiness and safety of the beloved is of greater concern than your
own. That, of course, can't apply to strawberries! And I would have
difficulty in applying it to our love for God, I think, wouldn't you?

But I have no difficulty whatsoever in
applying it to God's love for us. God's love for us is quite beyond
our imagination. It is constant, unremitting. God loves each and
every one of us as though we were unique. It doesn't matter who we
are, or what we have done, or whether we serve Him or not – God
loves us. In a way, our prayer ought to start with the love of God,
for it is from that love that the rest stems. If God didn't love us,
he would not have sent Jesus, nor the Holy Spirit.

Some of us here this morning have
children, maybe grandchildren. Anybody have great-grandchildren?
Well, I don't know about you, but I do remember that when my daughter
was born, I began to have a glimpse, just a tiny glimpse of what
God's love for us is like. That was a very long time ago, and I am a
grandmother now, but I still remember it. That realisation that
this, this is something a tiny bit like how God cares for me!
Amazing!

So, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,
and the love of God, and then, of course, the Fellowship of the Holy
Spirit. The Fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Some translations say
the Communion of the Holy Spirit. You notice it's “of” the Holy
Spirit, just as it is the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and
the love of God. The Holy
Spirit sends, among other amazing things, fellowship, communion.
Both with God and with one another.

Yes,
of course, we are friends. And there are always going to be people
in the church we are more friendly with and less friendly with, if
that makes sense. But by our very human nature, we're going to like
some people more than we like others. That's okay. But we are given
the gift of having fellowship with everybody in the Church, whether
we like them or whether we don't. We can sit beside them in worship,
we can pray for them and their concerns, we can lift them to the
Throne of Grace. And that is the gift of the Holy Spirit here.

And we
can also have fellowship with God. That sounds even more amazing,
doesn't it? Fellowship with God himself, the Creator. The Father –
Jesus said to call God “Father”, and what better day to remember
it as it's Fathers' Day. But I know that isn't helpful to everybody,
if they have had a poor relationship with their own father, for
instance. You may prefer a totally different name for God, and that's
okay, too – and often, your preferred name for God changes as you
travel along your Christian journey.

We
know the Old Testament was full of different names, from the plain
basic “El” that meant “The Lord” – you still get this in
names like “Michael” or “Rachel” or “Gabriel”, or any of
those Bible names that end in “El”. They all mean something
about God – Michael, for instance, means “Who is like God?”,
which is a rhetorical question because nobody is! Gabriel means
“Strong man of God”, and so on..... Anyway, names for God –
the plain basic “El” that I mentioned, and then a lot of other
ones – shepherd, judge, redeemer, king, rock. Or there is “El
Shaddai”, which has several different possible meanings, including
God the Destroyer, or even God with breasts – but is mostly used to
mean God Almighty.

And
talking of God with breasts, there are a few feminine names for God,
which you may or may not find helpful, including Lady Love, and Lady
Wisdom. Some people refer to the Holy Spirit as “She”, on the
grounds that the Hebrew word, Ruach, is feminine. Do so if you find
it helpful, but if it irritates you or feels gimmicky, then don't.

I seem
to have wandered rather far from “The fellowship of the Holy
Spirit”. But today isn't really a day for understanding, you see.
It's much more of a day for rejoicing. Someone years ago said it was
a day to celebrate the whole Godness of God, and I rather like that
definition. We will never even begin to understand who God is, and
that's okay. We know that we have a loving Father in God – or
whatever other title we wish to use. We we know that we have a
Redeemer and a Brother in our Lord Jesus. And we know that we are
filled with the Holy Spirit, who enables us to grow into the person
God created us to be, and who gives us all we need, and more beside,
to become that person.

And
then, there is the fact that it is a mystery. That we can't
understand or explain it. And that's great, too! So let us rejoice,
and give thanks to God. Amen.

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Welcome! I am a Methodist Local Preacher, and preach roughly once a month, or thereabouts. If you wish to take a RSS feed, or become a follower, so that you know when a new sermon has been uploaded, please feel free to do so.